Hyperledger And EEA Join Hands For Common Blockchain Standards

Recently, the Hyperledger Project and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) have announced their formal collaboration to accelerate the adoption of blockchain technology in the enterprise.

The, two organizations have identical objectives such as broadening and strengthening the community around and the adoption of enterprise blockchain technologies. The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance backs the development of specifications and standards for blockchain while Hyperledger fosters the development of open source software for connecting enterprise blockchain networks.

"This relationship will enable Hyperledger developers to write code that conforms to the EEA specification and certify them through EEA certification testing programs expected to launch in the second half of 2019. As members of each other’s organizations, both communities will be able to collaborate across tens of Special Interest Groups, Working Groups, meetups and conferences globally, across hundreds of thousands of developers in both communities."

Launched in early 2017, the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance has grown to more than 150 members including the likes of a state government from India by mid-2017. By the end of 2017, the EEA became the world’s largest blockchain consortium. The EEA’s world-class Enterprise Ethereum Client Specification ensures interoperability, multiple vendors of choice, and lower costs for its members – the world’s largest enterprises and most innovative startups.

Began in December 2015 as the largest industry-focused open-source blockchain effort at the time -The Hyperledger project released Hyperledger Fabric in July 2017, its first production-ready blockchain software for enterprises. The Hyperledger Fabric has been adopted in a number of industries, including the notable example of the world’s largest shipping company Maersk deploying the blockchain software to track shipments.

EEA and Hyperledger Work Underway

Hyperledger community has already been moving in an Ethereum-friendly direction. Earlier this year, Sawtooth (a codebase contributed to Hyperledger by Intel) added support for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) as a transaction processor. This made it possible to bring smart contracts developed for the public Ethereum blockchain over to Sawtooth-based networks.

"That effort", dubbed Seth,” is now in active use, and the developers anticipate submitting it for conformance testing to the EEA Spec 1.0 as soon as possible. Likewise, support for the EVM is now available in Hyperledger Fabric"

Another example of EEA and Hyperledger’s partnership is the EEA’s Special Interest Group on Trusted Execution Environments, and a prototype implementation of those proposed standards - “Private Data Objects” being developed within Hyperledger Labs. This project combines community-driven open standards and community-developed, production-quality open source reference implementation and is a best practice of Internet-scale software development work.

Brian Behlendorf and Ron Resnick believe "this mutually beneficial relationship will encourage Ethereum developers to consider submitting their enterprise projects to Hyperledger and Hyperledger project maintainers to consider taking de-facto interfaces appropriate for standardization to the appropriate EEA working groups. This relationship will also enable Hyperledger developers to write code that conforms to the EEA specification and certify them through EEA certification testing programs expected to launch in the second half of 2019."